In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term crime does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition, though statutory definitions have been provided for certain purposes. The most popular view is that crime is a category created by law; in other words, something is a crime if declared as such by the relevant and applicable law. One proposed definition is that a crime or offence is an act harmful not only to some individual but also to a community, society, or the state. Such acts are forbidden and punishable by law.
A misdemeanor is any "lesser" criminal act in some common law legal systems. Misdemeanors are generally punished less severely than more serious felonies, but theoretically more so than administrative infractions and regulatory offences. Typically, misdemeanors are punished with prison time of no longer than one year, monetary fines, or community service.
Criminal justice is the delivery of justice to those who have been accused of committing crimes. The criminal justice system is a series of government agencies and institutions. Goals include the rehabilitation of offenders, preventing other crimes, and moral support for victims. The primary institutions of the criminal justice system are the police, prosecution and defense lawyers, the courts and the prisons system.
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio was an Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher, economist, and politician who is widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment. He is well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology and the classical school of criminology. Beccaria is considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice.
Criminalization or criminalisation, in criminology, is "the process by which behaviors and individuals are transformed into crime and criminals". Previously legal acts may be transformed into crimes by legislation or judicial decision. However, there is usually a formal presumption in the rules of statutory interpretation against the retrospective application of laws, and only the use of express words by the legislature may rebut this presumption. The power of judges to make new law and retrospectively criminalise behaviour is also discouraged. In a less overt way, where laws have not been strictly enforced, the acts prohibited by those laws may also undergo de facto criminalization through more effective or committed legal enforcement. The process of criminalization takes place through societal institutions including schools, the family, and the criminal justice system.
In criminology, the classical school usually refers to the 18th-century work during the Enlightenment by the utilitarian and social-contract philosophers Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria. Their interests lay in the system of criminal justice and penology and indirectly through the proposition that "man is a calculating animal," in the causes of criminal behavior. The classical school of thought was premised on the idea that people have free will in making decisions, and that punishment can be a deterrent for crime, so long as the punishment is proportional, fits the crime, and is carried out promptly.
The feminist school of criminology is a school of criminology developed in the late 1960s and into the 1970s as a reaction to the general disregard and discrimination of women in the traditional study of crime. It is the view of the feminist school of criminology that a majority of criminological theories were developed through studies on male subjects and focused on male criminality, and that criminologists often would "add women and stir" rather than develop separate theories on female criminality.
Andreas von Hirsch, before 2008 published under his anglicised name Andrew von Hirsch, is a legal philosopher and penal theorist and the founding Director of the centre for Penal Theory and Penal Ethics at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. He also has been Honorary Professor of Penal Theory and Penal Law at Cambridge University, and an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College.
Islamic criminal law is criminal law in accordance with Sharia. Strictly speaking, Islamic law does not have a distinct corpus of "criminal law". It divides crimes into three different categories depending on the offense – Hudud, Qisas, and Tazir. Some add the fourth category of Siyasah, while others consider it as part of either Hadd or Tazir crimes.
Jonathan Simon is an American academic, the Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law, and the former Associate Dean of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Simon’s scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies, risk and the law, and the history of the interdisciplinary study of law. His other interests include criminology; penology; sociology; insurance models of governing risk; governance; the origins and consequences of, and solutions to, the California prison "crisis"; parole; prisons; capital punishment; immigration detention; and the warehousing of incarcerated people.
David Downes is a British sociologist and criminologist and is Professor Emeritus of Social Administration at the London School of Economics.
Rodney Emrys Morgan was Criminology lecturer at the University of Bath in the early 1980s and is Professor Emeritus, University of Bristol and Visiting Professor at the University of Sussex. He is the former chair of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (2004-7) and prior to that was HM Chief Inspector of Probation for England and Wales (2001-4).
Race is one of the correlates of crime receiving attention in academic studies, government surveys, media coverage, and public concern. Research has found that social status, poverty, and childhood exposure to violent behavior are causes of the racial disparities in crime. Research conducted in Europe and the United States on the matter has been widely published, particularly in relation to discrimination by criminal justice systems.
The criminal justice system of the Netherlands is the system of practices and institutions of the Netherlands directed at upholding social control, deterring and mitigating crime, and sanctioning those who violate laws with criminal penalties and rehabilitation efforts. The Netherlands' criminal code is based on the Napoleonic Code, imposed during the time of the French Empire. The Dutch largely kept the Napoleonic Code after their independence, but tempered it with a significantly more rehabilitative penological focus.
Sir Anthony Edward Bottoms FBA is a British criminologist. He is life fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, having previously been a Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminology in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 2006 and until December 2007 a professor of criminology jointly at the universities of Cambridge and Sheffield.
Criminology is the interdisciplinary study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field in both the behavioural and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, political scientists, economists, legal sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social workers, biologists, social anthropologists, scholars of law and jurisprudence, as well as the processes that define administration of justice and the criminal justice system.
Public criminology is an approach to criminology that disseminates criminological research beyond academia to broader audiences, such as criminal justice practitioners and the general public. Public criminology is closely tied with “public sociology”, and draws on a long line of intellectuals engaging in public interventions related to crime and justice. Some forms of public criminology are conducted through methods such as classroom education, academic conferences, public lectures, “news-making criminology”, government hearings, newspapers, radio and television broadcasting and press releases. Advocates of public criminology argue that the energies of criminologists should be directed towards "conducting and disseminating research on crime, law, and deviance in dialogue with affected communities." Public criminologists focus on reshaping the image of the criminal and work with communities to find answers to pressing questions. Proponents of public criminology see it as potentially narrowing "the yawning gap between public perceptions and the best available scientific evidence on issues of public concern", a problem they see as especially pertinent to matters of crime and punishment.
David Indermaur is an Australian clinical psychologist and writer.
French criminal law is "the set of legal rules that govern the State's response to offenses and offenders". It is one of the branches of the juridical system of the French Republic. The field of criminal law is defined as a sector of French law, and is a combination of public and private law, insofar as it punishes private behavior on behalf of society as a whole. Its function is to define, categorize, prevent, and punish criminal offenses committed by a person, whether a natural person or a legal person. In this sense it is of a punitive nature, as opposed to civil law in France, which settles disputes between individuals, or administrative law which deals with issues between individuals and government.
Roger Grahame Hood, CBE, FBA was a British criminologist. From 1996 to 2003, he was professor of criminology at the University of Oxford; he was also a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, from 1973 to 2003. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1992 and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1995.
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